SEO Siloing: How to build a website silo architecture

SEO Siloing: How to build a website silo architecture

Search engines award top keyword rankings to the site that proves that it the best fit for the relevancy of a subject or theme that matches the user query. As a result the primary goal of SEO is to improve the website so that the site is about more than targeted keyword phrases – it is about the themes matching those keywords.

More often than not, a website is a disjointed array of unrelated information with no clear central theme. Such a site suffers in search engine rankings for sought after keywords. Siloing a website will serve to clarify your website’s subject relevance and will lay the groundwork for high keyword rankings. It is a core building block for search engine optimization and is normally an advanced topic.

The term siloing originated as a way to identify the concept of grouping related information into distinct sections within a website. Much like the chapters in a book, a silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site. The reason this grouping is such a high SEO priority is that search engines award “keyword” relevancy within their index based on the page and then the rest of the site with the most supporting relevant content. Well ranked websites are founded upon the concept that a website should physically be organized like a doctoral dissertation. A dissertation has a clearly identified title, abstract, table of contents, then content laid out to reinforce the overall theme of the dissertation as a whole, all with references and footnotes supporting the subject.

Often, there are great websites hidden from widespread search engine results (SERPs) exposure because they lack an organic search engine optimization strategy or their strategy does not include enough attention to clear subject relevance or siloing. In this document you will find a strategy for improving the clarity of a website’s overall theme through siloing with the intent to improve keyword rankings.

Introductory Overview

Siloing of a website requires a multi-step process of planning and implementation.

Step 2: Consider whether you can implement a physical silo through the site’s directory structure and apply if possible. As an alternative, we will later discuss virtual silos where navigation and linking determine the theme.

Step 3: Carefully examine the link structure implemented throughout the site, applying linking techniques between pages that reinforce site themes.

Determining Website Theme

Google’s mission as stated on the company information page is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google uses an algorithm to predictably measure subject relevance in order to award rankings. By studying search results and high-ranking pages, it’s possible to learn about the ranking factors of the algorithm and how to make a site the most relevant. There are many characteristics of a website that demonstrate subject matter expertise, beginning with a clear understanding of theme and subject relevance.

In order to rank for keywords within Google, Yahoo and Bing, a site must provide information that is organized in a clear structure and language that search engines understand. When a site’s information has been stripped away from its design and layout, will it be the most relevant of all similarly themed sites? If so then you have a high likelihood of achieving high rankings and will attract customers researching and shopping for products and services in turn.

Siloing is not all there is to ranking, but without it the on-page relevancy battle is lost.

The on-page process of achieving high rankings begins by having a clear understanding of a website’s subject themes. When speaking at conferences and in training, Bruce Clay often explains the importance of creating subject themes, or silos, by using the analogy that most websites are like a jar of marbles. He states that a search engine can only decipher meaning when the subjects are clear and distinct. Take a look at the picture of a jar of marbles below and contemplate how search engines will classify the “theme” of this jar?

Figure 1: Jar of Mixed Marbles

In the jar above we see Green Marbles, Red Marbles, and Yellow Marbles mixed together with no order or emphasis. It would be reasonable to assume that search engines would classify the subject as a jar of marbles.

If we then separate out each group of colored marbles into separate jars, they would be classified as a jar of Green Marbles, a jar of Red Marbles and a jar of Yellow Marbles.

Green Marbles

Red Marbles

Yellow Marbles

Figure 2: Jars of Seperated Marbles

However, if we wanted to include all three marbles in a single jar, we could create distinct groupings within the jar that would allow the subject themes to remain separate as Green Marbles, Red Marbles, Yellow Marbles as well as the generic term “marbles.”

Figure 1: Jar of Siloed Marbles

The first mixed up jar of marbles (figure 1) is a non-siloed websites. The three separate jars represent separate sites (figure 2) and the last jar equates to one site with topics separated into theme-specific categories, or silos (figure 3). The goal for a site that wants to rank for more than a single generic term is to selectively decide what the site is and is not about. Rankings can be damaged in two common ways: 1) either by including irrelevant content or 2) having too little content about a subject. Avoid these mistakes by knowing the focus for the site and avoiding irrelevant subject matter.

What Subject Themes is Currently Ranking for Your Website?

The best place to start to identify the relevant themes for a site is to examine the historical traffic data of the website. The first thing to do is to examine the data from the following sources:

Web analytics evaluations

PPC programs

Tracked keyword phrases

Each of these sources of information will provide the history of who visits the website and why. It won’t directly explain why the site isn’t ranked for desired keywords, but it will help evaluate which themes of the site the search engines recognize.

Web Analytics Evaluation
There are several ways to obtain the data or logs for the history of search engine spiders and the footprints of visitors to your site. First, you may go right to the source and download the actual log files from your server and use a program to decipher Internet traffic data, but this is a rather time consuming process. Many businesses also use on-demand services that use cookies or JavaScript to pull live data on the patterns of search engines and visitors through an online service like the very popular Google Analytics, Omniture, or ClickTracks. However you choose to access the data history, you should look for the search terms that brought users to your site.

PPC Programs
Other clues to the words that your current site may be relevant for is to evaluate the words that your company bids on with Pay-Per-Click programs offered by all major search engines. Often companies will bid on words that they would like to be relevant for within the organic search arena but for one reason or another they have not yet received organic rankings. It is also useful to look at pages with high Quality Scores and see what they are about.

Tracked Keyword Phrases
The last and most accessible method of discovering your website’s most important subject themes is to ask people within your company which keywords are most important. Often in interviewing the president, marketing or sales managers, you will get an idea of what the company is trying to rank for in organic search results. These generally match the content, so it would be useful validate the expectations against the reality of the site.

Keyword Research
After creating a list of 10-100 keyword terms that appear to be most relevant to your company’s product and/or services, then it is time to begin keyword research. During the process of keyword research, the first goal is to grow the keyword list as large as possible. Cover as many relevant subjects, even those only somewhat connected to the website’s subject themes. Use keyword discovery tools to identify every possible synonym even remotely related to the site’s subject matter.

For SEOToolSet® users, after you have created as large a list as possible, enter all of your keywords and keyword phrases into the Keyword List Bulk Loader and specify a name for this keyword list. (You can set up multiple keyword lists.) Next, run a Ranking Monitor for your selected keyword list(s). You can click the Activity column to see the words sorted from the highest query activity to the least searched terms. You can use this information to identify the words that have a too low activity (usually anything less than 100 searches per day unless it’s a very targeted and relevant term) and possibly remove them from your list by choosing Manage Keywords. You can look at the Pages and Engines columns of the Ranking Monitor to see the keywords you currently rank for across the search engines.

After answering the question of where the site currently ranks, you will have identified two major factors: 1) you will know what you are ranked for and 2) you will know what you are not ranked for in the search engines. The next challenge will be to understand what subjects your site is legitimately relevant for and how to understand why you have your current rankings.

What Subject Themes are Legitimately Relevant for Your Website?

There is potentially a wide margin between what is possible, what the current reality is, and how a business is affected by these realities. Wisdom lies in knowing how to determine what a site is truly about after stripping away all the visual components. Skill lies in identifying non-ranking subject themes with the potential for better rankings and recognition of relevance by search engines.
A great place to begin is to run a Single Page Analyzer (SPA) within the SEOToolSet. (Those not subscribed to the SEOToolSet can use the free tool on our Free SEO Tools page at www.seotools.com.) The SPA will reveal the common word usage characteristics such as density, distribution and frequency of the keyword phrases used throughout the page.

By running the main pages of the site through this tool, you can begin to identify if the major themes are used throughout the page in the Meta tags, Headings, ALT attributes and body content. If your terms seem to be absent, make a note that the keyword usage is too low for that page. Evaluate how often a phrase is repeated in each major page element and make notes of frequency, including commonly repeated phrases and infrequently repeated phrases. Are all the terms concentrated in the top of the pages? If so make a note that the distribution could stand to be more spread out.

Multiple Page Analyzer
After evaluating if pages throughout your site contain rich keyword densities, compare findings of your site to the densities, distributions and frequencies of keywords of the top 10 competitors for your major keyword terms. Select the SEOToolSet Ranking Monitor, scroll to the Research Summary, enter the first keyword phrase and press the Submit button. This process will select 10 of the highest ranking sites for that term across all the major search engines. Clicking on the link at the bottom of the report and following the instructions explained in the SEOToolSet you will receive a report that summarizes why high ranking sites are ranked but more importantly you receive a footprint of the common characteristics of the top sites. Using this data you establish recommendations for bringing your own pages to the same characteristics level.

Search Engine Index Tools
The last test is to evaluate each major engine by using advanced search parameters. While each engine has its own individual syntax, for the sake of simplicity the engine referenced here will be Google. Take a moment to learn about all the ways you can filter search engine results through Google’s “site:” command and the “link:” command. Currently, the two most relevant factors of rankings in Google are how many pages a site has about a subject and how many inbound inks from other sites reference the site or specific pages. Use these tools to then research why competitor sites rank. Create a graph that documents the contrast between your site and the competition.

How Can You Implement Clear Subject Themes?

You now know what keywords the site is ranked for, which subjects the site is considered to be relevant for, and a good indication of why your competition ranks the way they do. At this point, you first want to make your site as good as the competition. Then you must make your site better than the competition. You want the search engines to see you as first among equals – the most relevant resource on the Web. It is important at this point to identify the gaps in your silos: areas that are relevant but which are not yet supported by obvious content on the site.

Is it worth the work to write any content to rank for a subject that the site is not really about? What about the likely possibility that diluting the site content will be seen as less relevant for more important terms? It is important that you make these choices now and consider the ramifications of each theme-based keyword phrase decision.